Trump Policy, Aging Population Change Estimate for US Growth

The US population is projected to grow by 15 million in 30 years, a smaller estimate than the one issued a year ago, because of President Trump's immigration policy and the aging population, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. The nonpartisan office projected that the population will increase from 349 million people this year to 364 million people in 30 years, a gain 2.2% smaller than it had predicted at this time last year, the AP reports. In September, the budget office issued a revised demographics report that showed Trump's plans for mass deportations and other immigration measures would result in roughly 320,000 people removed from the US over the next 10 years.

The country's total population is projected to stop growing in 2056 and remain roughly the same as in the previous year, the CBO said. But without immigration, the population would begin to shrink in 2030 as deaths start to exceed births, making immigrants an increasingly important source of population growth, according to the report. The figures released Wednesday are used by the CBO for budget projections and economic forecasts. Even if the limits on immigration and increased deportations end with the Trump administration in three years, "it's still a demographic shock," said William Frey, a demographer at the centrist Brookings Institution.

Social Security and Medicare, already buckling under an aging population, will be under increasing pressure with even fewer-than-expected people in the labor force paying taxes. By the end of the decade, all baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, will be over age 65. With fewer immigrants in the labor force and projections for fertility rates showing a long-term decline below replacement levels, "that reduces the number of kids who are going to be born in that four-year period" of the second Trump administration, Frey said.

"These immigrants bring both themselves and the potential for children in the near term," Kenneth Johnson, a University of New Hampshire demographer, told the AP . "They contribute both to the labor force through their arrival but also to the potential future growth of the US population through their potential to have children in the near term."